[Buildbot-devel] Switching from SVN to Mercurial

[Bob Hood]

I have just upgraded our Buildbot from 0.7.12 to 0.8.5, and at the same time,
we have migrated from Subversion to Mercurial.  The Mercurial<->Buildbot
interaction seems a bit brain damaged compared to Subversion<->Buildbot.  I'm
sure it's just my lack of understanding of Mercurial's peculiarities, and I'd
appreciate some help.

We currently have a single repository, with named ("inrepo") branches.  Our
main sandbox is "default", and each developer has their own named branches
within the same repository.  I have enabled the Mercurial "changegroup" hook
in the "trunk/.hg/hgrc" file with the following settings:

    [hooks]
    changegroup.buildbot = python:buildbot.changes.hgbuildbot.hook

    [hgbuildbot]
    master = localhost:9911
    auth = xxxxx:xxxxx

This is working (Buildbot is properly getting change notifications).  However,
it is not properly filtering the changes.  With a ChangeFilter() in my
master.cfg that looks like this:

    default_filter = ChangeFilter(repository="hg/trunk", branch=None)

is not filtering named branch modifications from those in the "default"
branch.  All changes are causing the automated build to re-purpose the local
clone on the slave to the modified branch, and build it.  Not what I want.  I
want a filter for the "default" branch, and filters for each of the
developer's named branches, each going into their one dedicated clone folders
on the slave.

I also tried using:

    default_filter = ChangeFilter(repository="hg/trunk", branch="default")

But this won't actually trigger builds for that branch for some reason.

I know there's a "branch =" value setting for the Mercurial "hgbuildbot"
section, but that seems to be a hard-coded branch name value that just gets
passed verbatim to Buildbot.  This hardly seems useful, when I need to
distinguish between individual in-repo branches.

I also tried defining a branch-change function:

    def default_branch_func(branch):
        return ('default' in branch)
    default_filter = ChangeFilter(branch_fn=default_branch_func)

But the value of the 'branch' argument always seems to come in as None instead
of an actual string value (or whatever value I set in the "branch =" value of
the "changegroup" hook).

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the Mercurial way of doing
things (Subversion was much easier).  Any pointers to a master.cfg that does
this very thing, or some feedback on this problem, would be appreciated.


Render me gone,                       |||
Bob                                 ^(===)^
---------------------------------oOO--(_)--OOo---------------------------------
    I'm not so good with advice...can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?